Director/Writer Joe Kawasaki responds to comments about the hacking in the film:

On the tech crits some viewers have mentioned, some notes from our code consultant (who would say this better than any one of us) regarding the whole windows commands on a mac issue. Mostly, because this is something that has been brought up several times, and so we want to set the record straight:

“I can understand it from his perspective that it would seem inaccurate but in reality it is a hack where she gains access to a windows machine from her mac.

i.e. when you use metasploit and hack into a box, you land into the victim’s machine and get the target’s command console (terminal). If they saw it close enough there is a section where stat is typing LPORT and RPORT.

These are signature comands when you are hacking into a machine using metasploit. So even if you are on linux or unix or a mac, hacking into a windows box once you are in the victim’s machine (windows) you get the victim’s terminal (command prompt) and you type their commands (windows commands).

Again, the real hack has a lot of commands to be typed and a lot of responses – around 10 to 15 mins worth…”

Unfortunately, certain things in the programming narrative had to be forsaken for the actual story narrative. We did have some long discussions with the coders to work it within the editing and structure of the film, so any discrepancies are certainly not their fault. For all of that, Joe and Sidney take full responsibility. We did the best we could to be relevant and accurate in so much as giving a slightly better representation of what hackers/programmers do than most films (where usually they’re just typing non-sensical garbage, or with text that is about 100 times larger than anything we would ever see on a working screen).

One of the surprising things about DEF CON was that during our long Q&A, no one brought up anything about the inaccuracies in the actual screens (believe me, we know there are quite a few). But we think in context to the rest of the film and to carry the story along, we hope they (the hacker/programming community) were able to forgive us those discrepancies for the latter.

And for anyone who isn’t tech-oriented or a hacker, none of this makes a difference. They gloss over all of that and just follow the main story line (in their minds, they may as well have been typing gibberish). Any bits that actually were straight programming language, or where actual tools of the trade may have been used, are specific nods to the hacker/programmer community, to say, hey, we did our best in that because we respect what happens and what you do.

We promise to give further due-diligence and work toward securing the proper details in any future endeavors with this subject Thank you for your time. Please email us any comments or further questions to our producer Sidney Sherman, info@rebootfilm.com.

Thank you again for supporting the film with your purchase and for taking the time to discuss it here.